Thursday, September 29, 2011

Bloomberg vs. Bloomberg

Paul Krugman today points to a strong piece by Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute, "Regulatory uncertainty: A phony explanation for our jobs problem," which completely debunks the GOP's beloved confidence fairy dust. This chimera and the "invisible bond vigilantes," have been our Cassandra's Homeric epithets for the past two years -- truths that cannot, it seems, be uttered in public frequently enough to penetrate the miasma of lies in which we live, or to which our putatively Democratic administration dovens.

The piece closes thus:

"In conclusion, when looking at both what employers are doingin terms of hiring and investing and what they (and their economists) are saying in private surveys, it’s nearly impossible to make the argument that uncertainty about regulations is holding back the economy. A Bloomberg News editorial makes the point even more broadly:

'There is no doubt that certainty is generally preferable to uncertainty, in the economy as in most aspects of life….But there is no evidence that uncertainty has increased during the Obama presidency, or that, if it has, the president’s policies are responsible for it…The charge of “creating uncertainty” is a way to blame Obama for the U.S.’s economic trials without having to explain the connection.'”

Bloomberg News, eh? So, here's what the eponym himself said on Meet the Press this past Sunday, from MSNBC's transcript:

MAYOR BLOOMBERG: Well, nobody has any confidence. If you're a bank and you have money, would you make a loan when people are talking about putting you in jail for what happened in the mortgage crisis three, four years ago? You hunker down. If you're a business, would you go take a loan and expand and hire more people when every day there's talk about different regulation, different tax policy? Business has to know what it's going to be in the future to plan because hiring people is a long-term commitment. If you're an individual, would you go take that extra vacation, buy a new house and that sort of thing when you're not sure whether Washington is going to do what's right to keep job creation going in America? That's the--in the end, it is confidence, confidence, confidence.

So much for our great Third Party hope. What it does suggest, though, is that he may actually be thinking seriously about running. Nonsense of this crassness is usually a harbinger of that.